A New Chronology for South American Colonization

Send us Fan Mail For nearly thirty years, a peat bog in southern Chile was the anchor of American prehistory. Monte Verde II told us humans were in the Americas 14,500 years ago — shattering the Clovis First paradigm and launching a new era of migration science. Then a new team came back, not to find more artifacts, but to read the geology. A 2026 paper by Todd Surivel and colleagues in Science deploys volcanic ash forensics and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating to argue that the...